"A Passionate Master"

A Passionate MasterPeter N. Miller JULY 9, 2015 ISSUE

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La République des lettresby Marc FumaroliParis: Gallimard, 480 pp., €25.00 (paper)

1.On July 6, 1417, the Venetian nobleman Francesco Barbaro sent a laudatory letter to GianFrancesco Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to the Antipope John XXIII and a leadinghumanist of his time. Barbaro praised Poggio’s extraordinary success in ferreting outancient texts from their moldering monastic hiding places while in Germany for theCouncil of Constance, to which Poggio had come along with the pope.

This letter, with its congratulations to Poggio on finding the work of such important writersas Tertullian and Lucretius, said that he deserved immortal glory in the “republic ofletters.” Marc Fumaroli, now the leading French historian of Renaissance intellectualhistory, observes that this is the first use of the phrase “republic of letters”—respublicalitteraria. It referred to the small group of Renaissance scholars who were engaged inrediscovering, reinterpreting, and enlarging on important Latin and Greek texts. In doingso, as Fumaroli and others have argued, they formed a new kind of community that didmuch to define the Renaissance and the ways of thinking that led to “modern” culture.

Despite the prominence of the term “republic of letters” in the later seventeenth andeighteenth centuries—the Huguenot encyclopedist and philosopher Pierre Bayle called hisjournal News from the Republic of Letters—it has only recently had serious attention inFrance, Italy, and Germany, as well as the United States and United Kingdom. The subjecthas grown in importance as a way of understanding why the period in Europe from 1500 to1800 is so important. No one has contributed more to this shift in perspective than MarcFumaroli.

Fumaroli was born in Marseille in 1932, spent his childhood in Fez, in Morocco, histeenage years in Marseille, and was then educated at the University of Aix-en-Provence

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Marc Fumaroli; drawing by James Ferguson

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and at the Sorbonne. He began his teaching career inLille before moving to Paris in 1976. He has remainedthere, first at the Sorbonne, and since 1986 at theCollège de France. In 1995 he was elected to theAcadémie française, that would-be modern Parnassuscreated by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to honor theheroes of French learning. He has written or editedtwenty books, the best known of which arecommentaries on recent cultural politics in France orcollections of texts such as L’État culturel (1991) andWhen the World Spoke French (2001; translation, 2011).In these books Fumaroli criticizes the present identityand cultural shallowness of France from the perspectiveof its past. But in most of his work he writes as ascholar speaking to other scholars.

Fumaroli is the most sure-footed guide we have to high culture in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century France. His works explore three main themes: the uses of classicalrhetoric in the late Renaissance, the century-long so-called Quarrel of the Ancients andModerns, and the Republic of Letters.

hat is perhaps his greatest book, L’Âge de l’éloquence (1980), is a vast study of howancient rhetorical theory was rediscovered and adapted in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. We may think of rhetoric as the superficial art of using words, but in Greek andRoman antiquity, rhetoric was a system of exposition—a way of structuring what onewanted to express—as well as, implicitly, a way of organizing knowledge. The orator hadto have an encyclopedic command of both historical and literary sources and the range ofemotions he could draw on. The study of rhetoric was intended to explain how an audienceresponds and why. While rhetoric was practiced in Imperial Rome, the system was


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developed for argument in the law courts and senate of the republic. Its most famous andinfluential practitioner and theorist was Cicero, who was killed in the wave of executionsfollowing the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE.

Fumaroli begins by surveying ancient texts on rhetoric. But when he turns toward thepresent he chooses a distinctive and telling event: the sixteenth-century debate aboutCicero. One the one hand, there were his Italian imitators who were so drawn to theclassical past that they used only the Latin words he used. On the other, there was theargument of Erasmus of Rotterdam, that were Cicero alive in the sixteenth century hewould have been among those who wanted to update language and draw on the vernacular.Erasmus pointed to Cicero’s own concept of decorum, the idea that expression andexpressiveness needed to conform to the time and place of exposition.

Fumaroli follows these two positions as examples of the debate that took place in Europebetween “ancients” and “moderns,” and he describes their permutations, among Jesuits,jurists, politicians, and princes of the Church in Counter-Reformation Italy and early-seventeenth-century France. Not only did the debate create the foundation for the literaryachievements of the century of Louis XIV—the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine,for example—but it also led to the modern notion of “literature” and “literary studies.”

Fumaroli also probed into the visual and theatrical culture of this period. He showed howthe same debates about how to update classical rhetorical theory for modern timesinfluenced painting in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Italy and France.Like the great scholars of the Warburg school, Fumaroli’s familiarity with early modernways of thinking enabled him to discern patterns, structures, and meanings derived fromclassical texts beneath the swirling figures in the paintings of the Italian Guido Reni, or thesilent, cold subjects in those of the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin. He analyzed painting as atheater of the emotions.

Fumaroli has been particularly astute in understanding the theater of Corneille as avocabulary of gestures derived from a variety of classical and contemporary sources.Fumaroli presents him not only as a successful playwright, but as a kind of transformingvehicle of culture in whose work Italy’s arts, its politics of “reason of state,” its Jesuiterudition, and its rhetorical styles are carefully distilled into something that seemed soFrench that, in turn, it set the standard for the next generation of French writers.

As Fumaroli shows, the supporters of the new absolutist state of Louis XIV were alsoamong those who wanted to push the boundaries of acceptable style in new directions.Against this background Fumaroli takes up the politics behind the famous Quarrel of theAncients and Moderns, which broke out with the publication of two books by CharlesPerrault—The Century of Louis the Great (1687) and Parallels of the Ancients and theModerns (1688). Fumaroli connects the later seventeenth century in France back to the


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debates over the classical heritage during the sixteenth century in Italy. He argues that therelationships between works of culture, political authority, and the influence of the past onthe present lie at the heart of modern European culture.

f there is a geographical momentum to Fumaroli’s history of rhetoric, it could be called“out of Italy.” The enormous presence of antiquity in the physical remains of the past—aswith Rome’s Aurelian walls or the ruins on the Palatine Hill—had been visible throughoutthe Middle Ages. But what emerged during the fifteenth century was a new idea ofantiquity as a model for living better. People could conduct relations with one another bydrawing on examples from Cicero, Virgil, Horace, or Homer. This new approach, for themost part, coexisted with Christian religious authority; most of those whom Fumaroliconsiders were able to accommodate Christian ideas of faith to pagan ideas of living. Butthe new idea of antiquity set off shock waves that spread across the Continent during thesixteenth and on into the seventeenth centuries.

Fumaroli considers how these waves rolled across France, how they collided with nativetraditions in painting, literature, and architecture, and how they shaped France in thecenturies before the French Revolution. Some aspects of the Revolution itself could beconsidered aftershocks from the great change—the revolution in the understanding of theclassical past—that we call the Italian Renaissance.

The reencounter with the ancient world began with coins and buildings and manuscripts,but it soon spread to daily life in the distant past—clothing, food, religion, calendars, law.These, in turn, began to change the ways in which modern people lived in the world. Dress,speech, comportment—all that we might subsume under the notion of personalstyle—began to show the impact of antiquity.

The pressure of the past created the new forms and practices of life that are Fumaroli’sprincipal subject. He might have chosen to explore it by focusing on Michel de Montaigne,who expressed himself in a genre of his own devising that is both a monument to and adocument of the conversion of old texts into new forms. Fumaroli wrote a beautiful essayabout this aspect of Montaigne, but only one. It is almost as if he was arguing that therewere darker corners more in need of illumination. His studies of the translation andreception in later seventeenth-century France of the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián showGracián as having the kind of insight and importance that others assign to Montaigne.

2.Just how did antiquity shape living? This is the question that permeates Fumaroli’s essaysin La République des lettres. “Republic” was an ancient word with dense and variousmeanings. But when fifteenth-century scholars used the term “letters” (litterae or litteraria)

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what exactly did they mean? Fumaroli turns for help to the prefaces written at the end ofthe fifteenth century by the scholarly Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Aldus (or Aldo, inItalian) produced beautiful editions of the Greek and Roman classics, often the first timeany of them had been printed. He cut type, inventing italics. (His achievement as a single-handed reviver of antiquity was recently the subject of a stirring exhibition at the GrolierClub in New York. )

It was Aldus, according to Fumaroli, who also helped develop the very terms in which therevival of classical learning would perpetuate itself. For example, he identified hisaudience as the “students of good letters” (studiosi bonarum litterarum) and “most lovingof good letters” (amantissimi bonarum litterarum). For Aldus, his writers and their readers,“letters”—literature in our sense, but also ancient learning of all sorts—represented avision of a better future. “I hope that in a near future,” he wrote, “with barbarism destroyedand ignorance vanquished, good letters and the true disciplines will be embraced not, asthey are now, by a tiny minority, but by universal accord.”

Those “lovers of good letters,” however, had to confront an ancient dichotomy betweenotium, generally translated as “ease,” or “pleasure,” and its opposite, negotium, from whichwe get our modern “negotiation,” but which more precisely means “engagement with theworld.” While otium may have seemed an appropriate aristocratic response to basepracticalities, the Romans of the late republic, like Cicero, viewed it as a kind of derelictionof duty. Hence study, which from the outside could look very like abstention from the lifeof the community, had to be “saved” from the association with purely personal pleasure.“Ease with dignity” (otium cum dignitate) was the ancient answer, so that learningrepresented legitimate care of the self. In this debate about otium and duty we can see theformation of the idea of citizenship that animates modern politics.

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Dominique Nabokov

Marc Fumaroli, Paris, March 2009

If part of being a citizen is belonging to a community, then communication is essential.Fumaroli identifies citizenship of the republic of letters with “conversation.” We may takethis word for granted, but much serious thinking was devoted to its meaning and scope inthe sixteenth century. Conversation referred not just to the ways people spoke but to muchelse: how talking fitted in with one’s life; the places of such talk; the societies that werecreated to carry on such talk. Written letters, which facilitated the conversation of absentfriends, preserved the importance of dialogue even as they developed their own rules.

Bound up in “conversation” were the values at the core of a new and decidedly nonclericaland nongovernmental sphere of life. Hegel later used the term “civil society” to refer towhat members of the republic of letters wrote about as “civil conversation”—conversationoutside the bounds of bureaucracies and official conclaves. Conversation was a kind ofperformance and was often depicted as such: Cesare Ripa, for example, who published afrequently reprinted book about visual messages, Iconologia (1593), included a figure of“Conversation.” And when the book was republished in mid- eighteenth-century Germanywith new engravings, it also came out with a new image: a “Modern Conversation” thatreflected a century’s change in thinking and living. Watteau’s series of “Conversation”paintings do the same with much greater subtlety.


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3.Fumaroli sees in the revival of ancient rhetoric a force that reshaped social norms. Thosewho studied the ancient world and made possible this cultural revolution were alsotransformed by the practice of study. A life in letters could be a form of self-fashioning. Weknow, for instance, that Poggio’s Florentine correspondent Niccolò Niccoli was famous forthe beauty of his dishes, clothing, and house. We know that Donatello designed interiorspaces in which meetings for conversation could take place and that Pomponio Leto, laterin the fifteenth century, celebrated the ancient Roman holidays with his friends in the newRome.

To these well-known examples, in one of the longest essays in his book, Fumaroli adds theProvençal humanist Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637). Through his study of PeirescFumaroli shows how, during the seventeenth century, a life devoted to “letters” became acultural ideal. Drawing on Peiresc’s vast network of correspondents, Fumaroli evokes hiscommitment to collaboration and communication, to generosity and hospitality, totolerating difference and avoiding angry disagreement. Peiresc, he shows, created a modelof citizenship for the republic of letters as a whole.

Peiresc lived in Provence, along the major routes from Italy into France, and he was activeat the crucial moment when the most innovative adaptations of antiquity into modernculture were beginning to occur not in Italy but in France during the first part of theseventeenth century. Peiresc was an astronomer, an antiquarian, a historian of Provence, anindefatigable writer to other members of the Republic of Letters. His career is crucial forunderstanding the broader relationship between the movements of thought we call theRenaissance and the Enlightenment. His work and his relations with others also define theparticular classicism of seventeenth-century French culture.

Fumaroli locates a tipping point in the 1620s, just after Peiresc left Paris. For that briefmoment there coexisted, in equipoise, an erudite, Latin-speaking, male republic of letters inthe learned circle that gathered daily in the “cabinet” of the brothers Pierre and JacquesDupuy, and a French-speaking, mixed-gender, more literary milieu that packed the “blueroom” of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. In the group who met with theDupuys there assembled Peiresc’s friends and Poggio’s heirs; in the “blue room” therewere men and women who knew little about Peiresc and even less about philology. Theywere, however, keen on new forms of writing and speaking while they had also absorbedsomething of the classical renewal that had been going on around them. They wanted to cuta figure in the world of contemporary society—in both the court and the city, to borrowErich Auerbach’s terms.

In short, this was the time of the birth of the salon, and the beginning of the trajectory that

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led to the coffeehouse, the magazine, the public gardens, and the museums of theeighteenth century. These developments can all be closely tied to the rise of commercialsociety, the novel, and new kinds of history-writing. It was a momentous transformationthat occurred before the French Revolution and throughout Europe, and it has justifiablyengaged some of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers and historians, amongthem Franco Venturi and Reinhart Koselleck. Fumaroli’s work belongs alongside theirs.

4.In 1954, the young François Furet, who was to turn upside down the interpretation of theFrench Revolution, passed the agrégation, the national examination for entry into the ranksof advanced teachers in France. The president of the reviewing committee was the greathistorian Fernand Braudel. It was five years after the publication of his epochal book on theMediterranean and four after his election to the Collège de France. When Braudel askedwhat Furet wanted to work on, he answered, “The French Revolution.” Braudel shook hishead: “Don’t we know all that already?”

Packed into Braudel’s statement of doubt was the certainty of a dominant historicalexplanation—that of social and economic history—and a dominant historiographicaltradition—that of the Annales, the legendary journal founded by Marc Bloch and LucienFebvre in the previous generation. In the space of Furet’s career that entire structure ofcertainty was put in doubt. If the current generation of historians now emphasizes thepower of ideas in causing the Revolution, and rejects Marxisms both dogmatic andsophisticated, this can be traced, in large part, to Furet’s work. The French eighteenthcentury has become a different country.

Fumaroli has done the same for the early seventeenth century. If he is less famous thanFuret, this has to do with the fame of Fumaroli’s chosen period, which mostly lacks thepowerful presence of Louis XIV’s Versailles or the Revolution. Yet Fumaroli has almostsingle-handedly made the intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inFrance necessary for understanding those later, more glamorous periods. For him, as forChateaubriand and Tocqueville, the ancien régime had declined and fallen long before theRevolution broke out. Men like the Comte de Caylus, another of Fumaroli’s subjects, sawin antiquity the means to reform the present.

Fumaroli is attracted to such figures. They unsettle the conventional dichotomy betweenprogressive and conservative. If we look at his own work, not only his explicit criticism ofthe often stultifying contemporary cultural bureaucracy in France, but his fascination withthe erudite Latin culture of clerics, jurists, and austere humanists, we see a similarresistance to convention. Like them, Fumaroli sees himself in dialogue with long-deadwriters and thinkers and draws on them for ideas. Like Nietzsche’s, many of Fumaroli’s


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essays could be subtitled “untimely meditations.”

Braudel once wrote an alluring but flawed essay called in English “Out of Italy.” If Fureteventually demonstrated how mistaken Braudel was about the French Revolution,Fumaroli has written the “Out of Italy” that Braudel could not. Braudel introduced his lovefor the Mediterranean as the love of a northerner, from Lorraine, for a south as mythical asit was for Goethe when he came down from the Brenner Pass and beheld the Po Valleybelow. Fumaroli contrasts the “vivid colors” of the south with a northern Italy “bydefinition less flamboyant, more reserved, more economical.” This is not mythology.Fumaroli is himself a man of the south. As with many great scholars, his personalinclinations have become a kind of divining rod for research. What is powerful aboutFumaroli’s work, whether on Peiresc or Chateaubriand, and very much in the spirit of theirown, is a barely concealed hint of passion, especially the passion to know and tounderstand.

Caylus, in the preface to the second of the six volumes of his Collection of Egyptian,Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities, gave an account of this scholar’s passion that isstill valid today. The scholar, he wrote,

examines ancient remains; he compares them with those already known; he researchestheir divergence or conformity; he reflects; he discusses; he formulates theconjectures that the distance in time and the silence of writers makes necessary. If oneof these fragments offers ideas about the workings of art, either neglected, lost orrejected by the Moderns, the pleasure of experimenting, of describing them, energizeshim and flatters his taste.

But nothing is comparable to the satisfaction of envisioning some usefulness for thepublic. This idea penetrates him; it touches his heart, and the happiness of succeedingamply compensates him for all his cares and all his pains. Voilà, I declare, the thingsthat have seduced me.

See Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz,

1980); Héros et orateurs: rhétorique et dramaturgie cornéliennes (Geneva: Droz, 1990); L’École du silence: le sentiment des images au XVIIe

siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). ↩

Fumaroli, Le sablier renversé: des modernes aux anciens (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). ↩

“Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting than Bronze” was recently on view at the Grolier Club. ↩

Fumaroli’s exploration of conversation can be followed in two other collections of his essays, La diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La

Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, Éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1994) and Exercices de lecture de Rabelais à Paul Valery (Paris: Gallimard,

2006). ↩

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See Erich Auerbach, “La Cour et la Ville,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1984; first edition,

1959), pp. 133–182. ↩

It was originally commissioned for an Italian publisher and appeared with the title Il Secondo Rinascimento. ↩

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"A Passionate Master"

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